Wednesday, August 6

I should have walked away from this computer an hour ago, but I have not
quite been able to bring myself to do so. It is a new Macintosh, with a shiny
two-toned sort of tower case, chrome, a white keyboard, and a huge flatscreen
monitor standing on clear plastic legs. There are little icons on the edges of
the monitor, one for power and one for display settings, with backlights that
pulse elegantly when you touch them. Netscape runs beautifully here, there is
a simple terminal icon on the dock providing an instant window into the
essentially Unixy guts of the system, and even the mouse is acceptable.

I will never have any long term faith in Apple again; there have been too
many betrayals and abuses and long slides into utter mediocrity for that, but
there is no escaping the fact that this is a beautiful machine, capable of
running beautiful software.

seeing things

Brent and
Stephen have been talking about
routine, every day life, the big picture and the small one. I do not think I
will enter the fray directly because I'm not sure what I could add, or
precisely what we'd be arguing about if I did. I suspect Brent's feelings
about the significance of daily life reflect things it's very healthy
to know; similar thoughts have helped me realize from time time that I am
genuinely happy, and there is a hell of a lot to be said for that. I
sympathize with Stephen's bigger picture thoughts because there is
inexpressibly more that it would be possible for me to see.

I think that ultimately the failure to see, little things or big
ones, is the essence of tragedy. Routine can help or hinder vision,
just as dreaming can.

strategic withdrawal: any refusal to man our habitual political or
psychological trenches or to defend our turf, for though the turf may be holy,
our defenses, when they grow automatic, are not
...

strategic withdrawal: any act you can devise, any psycho-spiritual act at
all, that embodies a willingness to wait for the world to disclose itself to
you, rather than to disclose yourself, your altruism, your creativity, skills,
energy, ideas and (let's face it) agenda, myopia, preconceptions, delusions,
addictions and inappropriate trajectories to this world

let 'em cry in the dark

Last weekend I went to
Curtis with Molly. Her family lives there; her dad is
a lawyer and her brother plays guitar in a literal garage band.

Curtis is like any other small Nebraska town, and of course it's also not.
The Southwest quadrant of the state differs some from the places I have lived
lately; the geography and the people have a different shape to them. Still
Nebraska, but I guess there is also more of the West about it, something you
don't feel at all in Cedar county or the two, maybe three honest-to-god
cities. There are other small differences, too - the tiny ag college, the
volunteer-run theater on main street, a lumber yard still hanging on just
outside the full reach of Menards and Home Depot.

You have to pay attention or none of it signifies all that much, and even
then it's doubtful you could come to any conclusion without really being
immersed in the local life. In a place like Curtis, that might take a lifetime
or better.

The reason we drove out was Six Pack and a Pepper, a rock festival for
which Molly's brother was at least partially responsible. There were half a
dozen bands; punk, punk edging into metal, genuine and amazingly energetic
hardcore, and relatively straight up rock. There was not much of a crowd,
there is never much of a crowd, but I remain amazed to have seen something
like this in a Nebraska town where the population number on the little green
signs is unlikely to ever top 900.